Indian Cricket And Cash Can Belong To Disney Through Fox’s Star

12/15/2017

The fast-growing Indian media market could open up to Walt Disney Co from its anticipated deal with Twenty-First Century Fox Inc as the former would have opportunities to take advantage of in India through cricket rights and local-language TV shows.

The popular Hotstar streaming service and the Star India which runs 69 TV channels in eight different local languages could be the program distribution means for Disney following the anticipated $75 billion deal. global rights to professional cricket would also be gained by Disney.

“It is an amazing opportunity to get into the best developing market in the world,” MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Nathanson said, “but it is highly competitive.”

It has been a year that Amazon.com Inc’s Prime Video is operational in India while it is two years that Netflix Inc had begun offering its streaming service the market there.

In the United States, the shifting trends of viewer from traditional television to digital viewing have left ESPN, the largest network of Disney there, losing out on subscribers and as such international expansion is important to Disney.

The consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers expects that the subscription TV market households in the Indian market would reach 167 million in 2021 from its 154 million households currently which is the second-largest market in Asia.

There is also booming growth in mobile video traffic. Between the years 2016 and 2012, this market in India would witness a compound annual growth rate of 68 percent, according to KPMG.

There were no comments from either Disney or Fox.

There is also a lot of cash at hand with Star India. In fiscal 2018, $500 million before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization earnings on Fox projects will be $500. That value is anticipated to grow to $1 billion in 2020.

“Star India alone is by far the most successful TV network in the fastest-growing country,” Macquarie Research analyst Tim Nollen said.

At present there is slow growth in U.S. ad spending and in this environment, new streams of advertisement revenues could be generated by Star’s TV business. Star India noted a double-digit increase in growth in the first fiscal quarter which helped a 10 percent jump in the international revenue for Fox. In the U.S., the company saw a growth rate of 3 percent in ad revenue.

in the world’s second-most populous country – India, a competitive edge over competing content providers would be provided to For Disney by owning Star India.

“New entrants like Netflix will need a lot of time to recreate” a service like Hotstar because of its sports rights and head start in producing programming in multiple Indian languages, Barclays analysts said in a research note.

B. Riley FBR analyst Barton Crockett said in a research note that on the overall, India is “an egregious area of under-exposure” for Disney networks even though there are some channels of the company that are already distributed inn India.

And in the market, Disney would be able to significantly enhance its presence after addition of about 720 million viewers of Star every month in India. Prem Parameswaran, chief executive of North America for Eros International Plc. said that Hotstar and the Star channels could be the places where Disney could put its content. With an online streaming service, Eros is a movies, shows and music distributor in India.